Leaving C4D-Land.

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After 9 years we're jumping ship to Houdini. The H16.5 new features video just reinforced that SideFX are disappearing off down the road at an alarming speed and it's time to stop training on the Indie version and buy an Artist license of HoudiniFX. Redshift and Houdini are a wonderful pairing which was the real clincher.

This puts the lightweight R19 release into perspective.

For MAXON to deliver the toolset of H16.5 it'll take them and all of the C4D plugin developers another 10 years, Houdini as it stands now is pretty much C4D plus every plugin you've ever even dreamt about and in a couple more years of this pace of development Houdini will have lapped C4D. My Vimeo feed has been telling me Houdini is the future for the last year as all the mograph studios and artists that I followed have moved on to Houdini. It feels like Houdini is gaining momentum in the mograph field and anybody who is anybody is either using Houdini or in the process of learning it.

But but why don't you wait for R20? Pfft.

We've given up waiting for any official communication from MAXON that R20 will address the concerns of many users and waiting another year only to be disappointed is just a waste of our time. I personally have no faith that C4D will challenge the likes of Maya or Houdini in any aspect of 3D ever again and the best days of C4D are well and truly behind it. To believe R20 will be a messiah release requires a certain level fanboyism that I no longer possess, history suggests disappointment.

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I’ve been thinking about the exact same thing as I’m a Redshift user too! I have to make some math in order to see how much it would cost me to maintain an Houdini seat comparared to C4D. Not to mention the learning curve and how much time to get me where I am at the moment with C4D.

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Oh man the game pad camera, how I wish we had this with c4d. When I have finished my current film in c4d, I'm making a big dive into Houdini - and meanwhile hoping that chaos group tune vray for Houdini, which I'm told is around the corner. C4d is wonderful and all that, but ... Houdini is another dimension

when i saw the features of that 16.5 demo a week ago and the whole presentation a couple of days later it made me think. houdini really has become the one-does-it-all DCC software and i will pick it up again soon i guess... i was playing around a bit with it about 2 years ago and i just gave up because it was so complicated, at least to me. also my computers struggled a bit with it, got a bunch of crashes. and that's basically what made me stick with c4d, ease of use and stability, regarding features c4d falls behind rapidly, not just in comparison to houdini. i will wait for the all-mighty r20 release, not that i have high hopes for it, just because i won't be able to learn houdini that fast and i need something to get the work done. and to be honest, c4d does everything i need it to do for the kind of work i make my living with, but it's just too tempting to see how much fun all those fancy houdini features could add to my spare time.

long story short: good luck, maybe we'll meet again on the other side.

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Because the limitations I'm dealing with are partially hardware-related and we're likely to find out if those limitations are lifted by Spring or early Summer (i.e. before R20), I'm going to stick around a while longer. That and I am hopeful XP4's performance with Cycles4D is such that it solves some of the problems on their own.

But that Houdini demo is damn impressive. The rate at which they innovate absolutely puts MAXON (and pretty much everyone else making a DCC product) to shame. I get there's a big learning curve there but the feature set is indeed far ahead of C4D at this point. Release 17 won't be that far behind. I won't be surprised if i find myself with a copy of v17 Indie when the time comes, making the transition that way.

The pace of innovation is what's going to kill MAXON here, potentially. I get their dedication to stability and that's commendable but it's also a liability in this context as I don't believe Houdini (unlike Maya) is known for being a buggy mess.